A New Batch of Personal Essays, Plus Details For This Week's AWP Memoir Monday Reading
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
*Starting later this week, there’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish. So, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
Read about our expansion plans here. Stay tuned for submissions guidelines coming next week. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Essays from partner publications…
My High School’s Secret Fantasy Slut League
by Lena Crown
"It was a Saturday night in early spring 2011, and Charlotte was cold. She wasn’t yet drunk enough not to be. The zipper on her North Face kissed her stomach, and she shivered. Under their jackets, she and her friends were wearing nothing but thin tube tops and leopard-print spandex skirts, matching uniforms purchased from Wet Seal that afternoon to reflect the party’s theme: “Welcome to the Jungle.” This was the weekend ritual in high school: Coordinate outfits, plan the pregame, secure the booze, put on the costumes, drink the booze, take pictures, then trek 20 minutes into the hills to whatever house was hosting that week’s big “DP” (short for “Dance Party”)."
How a Secret Becomes a Story
by Melissa Fu
"My pen scrambles to catch his words. I make my best guesses at the spellings of cities, towns, and relatives I’ve never heard of. I don’t dare interrupt, don’t dare break the spell. I don’t want his silence to return. When he finally stops, I have covered eight pages of loose-leaf paper, front and back, with a hurried scrawl of names, dates, and details: a wooden monkey puzzle picture, kerosene bottles, a valuable hand scroll, watermelon seeds."
How to Date While You’re Grieving
by Matt Ortile
“To talk about grief is to talk about love. I open up to my dates about Mom for the same reason I share my coming-out story, my ambitions, or the books I adore most in this world: to shed light on what shapes me, animates me, has become an intractable part of who I am. To love me, I fear, is to also live with this loss. Just as I am continually learning how it shapes me, we can try to see together, if you like, how it might affect our relationship, what I will need from you—and you me. My habitual disclosure of grief has been a test, a warning, an acknowledgement of why I’m not sparkling—sometimes all of these things at once. Now, I mean it as an invitation: Would you like to walk together?”
Complete the Sentence
by Maya Jewell Zeller
“Directions: Look at the word boxes below. Decide which word box best fits your childhood. Then, choose a set of sentences that work for your word box.
OR come up with a set of sentences for your childhood. Then, redact the words and create a word box for your childhood. Finally, write a word to complete each sentence below.”
A Discarded Shirt
by Naren Nanda
“Seated above the wheels in the last of three rows of seats, I am experiencing every little movement of the uneven ride. Behind me is the luggage compartment, and in it is my father. I think of the sack, which has a garland of marigolds wrapped around it, bouncing around back there, without even the restraint of a seat belt to hold it in place.”
Letting Go of My Long Hair, and All That it Carried
by Vanessa Mártir
“In early 2021, when my wife and I bought a house in the woods of upstate NY, I was ready for the big chop. It was a symbolic new beginning. I was 45, and felt more grounded and self-assured than ever.”
Essays from around the web…
A Dream, A Fish, Allen Ginsberg and Me
By Carol Shamon
“It was the summer of 1983 that I attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I had just turned 26. I had graduated college four years earlier with a safe degree in teaching. Instead of teaching though, I moved to San Diego to be near the coast, the edge. I worked at night as a waitress. During the day I went to the beach alone with my books and journal. My reading felt like a treasure map. I followed the words of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Anias Nin, Djuna Barnes. One writer would lead me to another. I felt like all these writers were in on the treasure hunt. Maybe we were searching for the same symbols. I wanted to join the search, look for the treasure. I wanted to scream the yes, yes, yes of discovery.”
Katya’s House
by Shana Graham
"Can we count the widows in Florida? There’s one over there, wheeling her walker up and down the weary aisles of Festival Flea Market, fingering half-price eyeshadow compacts, skin creams, her hands shaking as she reaches to place them back in the bin. There’s another, sitting at that same booth at Bagel Tree with her lipstick-stained coffee mug and untouched crossword, gazing out into the parking lot like she’s waiting for something to rise from the sizzling pavement that no one else can see… Can we count the widows waiting in doorways for the mail to arrive? Waiting in the rows of little houses on Whispering Palm Drive and Springtree Road and Flamingo Lane, , bright green grass and tennis courts and clubhouses and ambulances. Waiting until one by one they disappear."
Dispatches From the Heart of the Teeming Void
by Michael Meyerhofer
"Because my grandmother died of COVID, we were not allowed to visit her. For weeks, she languished in a hospital bed, gulping more and more oxygen from a mask until a doctor explained that intubation would soon be necessary--and after ninety years rocking grandchildren, canning tomatoes, surviving fifteen presidents, weathering countless illnesses, funerals, and over sixty years married to a shell-shocked alcoholic, this was a fight she couldn't win. So she elected to remove the mask while two of her children, covered in plastic armor, held her hands. Only two relatives could be in the room, you understand. The rest of us watched her die over Zoom from the hospital parking lot.”
The Stories Women Tell of Loneliness
by Anandi Mishra
“I found the anonymity, obsession, and absurdity of Imamura’s novel and the peevish, circuitous, and perambulatory tone of Lahiri’s Whereabouts echoed in the BBC Three show Fleabag. As an angry and dazzlingly intelligent young woman, Fleabag’s eponymous protagonist is certainly more glamorous and gregarious than Lahiri’s and Imamura’s central characters, but she, too, is a profoundly feminine portrait of bitter loneliness. “Women are born with pain built in,” a character asserts in Fleabag’s Emmy-winning second season. “We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out.” We see the utter loneliness of the character Fleabag, whose two closest companions—her mother and her best friend—have died. She is suffering from a lack of attention.”
Funambulist
by Dian Parker
“I've had the same tightrope for 25 years, and learned that there are all kinds of tightrope walking situations - always with the potential of falling.”
📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:
By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:
The title of the essay and a link to it.
The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received.
Announcements:
🚨Don’t miss the AWP edition of the quarterly Memoir Monday reading, hosted by founder Lilly Dancyger—Wednesday, March 23rd at 7pm at Head House Books in Philadelphia, featuring Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn, Kristin Keane, Emily Maloney, and Edgar Gomez.
You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
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